What is the startup Humane actually building?

Secretive Startup may launch later this Spring.

In the secretive back-end of Silicon Valley stealth startups and wearables labs, there is a place where augmented reality meets artificial intelligence, and it may be Humane. Founded in 2018 by ex-Apple executives, the mysterious Humane company has announced $100 million in new funding plus a shift into AI — and still has no product to announce. This isn’t a story like Magic Leap, this is something way more tangible in the end I believe.

But with rumours Humane is working with OpenAI and has gone further into A.I. of late, things are starting to get interesting. Consider who is involved in their latest Series C: the Series C, attracted a laundry list of notable investors, including Kindred Ventures (which led the round), SK Networks, LG Technology Ventures, Microsoft, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Tiger Global, Qualcomm Ventures and OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman.

I actually find which companies OpenAI and Sam Altman have invested in, fairly interesting.

Sam Altman was recently tied to a longevity startup as well. It seems it’s not just Elon Musk trying to bring us to Mars and such.

What’s weird about Humane is how big they are without us having clarity into what they actually do. Humane has raised $230 million from existing and previous investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Its workforce has grown correspondingly larger, now numbering exactly 200 employees.

Humane was formed in 2018 by two Apple veterans, former director of software engineering Bethany Bongiorno and designer Imran Chaudhri. The two reportedly met while working on the iPad, and left Apple in 2017 to begin working on their company. Five years later I think they are pivoting their AR and wearables company more to Generative A.I. Perhaps integrating OpenAI’s API somehow.

So why are we even talking about Humane today in 2023? It’s because wearables and Generative A.I. are going to converge in the mid 2020s. It seems however that the PR is mostly clickbait, as neither Chaudhri nor Bongiorno are ready to talk about what Humane’s been building exactly or where the product is at.

Mischief and Secrecy

I would say that they are building wearables around social commerce and how it may interact with Generative A.I. and conversational A.I. about now in 2023. Let’s go back in time and according to TechCrunch there are some rather useful hints about the mission behind Humane.

In 2020, Humane filed an application with the USPTO (spotted by 9to5Google) for a “body-worn device” that uses a “laser projection system” instead of a display — essentially projected AR glasses that can identify objects in the real world and apply digital imagery to them. And as recently as three years ago, Humane was hiring Android developers to create apps for “personal live broadcasting” as well as “senior monitoring,” “memory recall” “and “personal guide.”

What if AR glasses could be gateway to social commerce, how people buy things off of live-videos of Creators who are involved perhaps in selling E-commerce products? Now what if they were powered by Generative A.I. and GPT-4 equipped chatbots?

So what is Humane Building?

It’s fun to speculate about a company like Humane, and how they might change comms with AR and LiDAR like capabilities to how we control devices and an ambient computing world where IoT will mature now with Voice-AI capabilities that put Alexa, and Google “smart speakers” to shame.

TechCrunch notes that blogger John Gruber paints a slightly different picture (see his blog here) — one informed by a leaked copy of Humane’s 2021 pitch deck. He writes: “The deck describes something akin to a Star Trek communicator badge, with an AI-connected always-on camera saving photos and videos to the cloud, and lidar sensors for world-mapping and detecting hand gestures.”

Whatever the case may be to be able to get $230 million is not an easy feat, even if you are ex-Apple. We will indeed know more later this Spring, 2023 - Humane Inc., founded by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, plans to launch, according to the WSJ, a product this spring that incorporates artificial intelligence into a consumer device.

The WSJ are putting weight on patents, which makes sense I suppose. Published patents suggest Humane intends to build a wearable device that may be capable of projecting a display with which users could interact.

“Air and touch gestures can also be performed on a projected ephemeral display, for example, responding to user interface elements,” the patent reads. This is what leads me to believe the product will have to do with how consumers interact with potential products like we see in social commerce. The AppleWatch can only do so much in spite of fancy health tracking.

Chaudhri is annoying vague when it comes to PR:"

At Humane, we’re building a first-of-its-kind device and services platform — we’re growing fast, and we’ve been focused on innovation, research and development.”

I’m into futurism and first of its kind devices, but what the hell!

According to Appleinsider, the company originally stylized as hu.ma.ne, has steadily recruited Apple staff such as a former 5G modem lead, and an iCloud executive. It must indeed be convenient to hire ex colleagues.

Additionally dozens of so-called “decorated ex-Apple employees” responsible for the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard, elements of Apple’s industrial design and infrastructure for Apple services like iCloud, Apple Pay and Home.

Perhaps I can use AR and A.I. as the future interface for some apps like banking and other digital services? I think it’s cute though, the husband and wife co-founders were longtime Apple executives who departed in 2016.

The PR is relatively interesting in terms of interoperability between A.I. and devices and perhaps has more far reaching potential. As part of a fundraising announcement Wednesday, the company said it would be working with Microsoft to power Humane’s cloud services. Humane would also be partnering with OpenAI to integrate its AI technology into the Humane device.

If Google acquired Fitbit and Apple has AppleWatch, perhaps Microsoft is interesting in their AR Glasses or whatever it is. The Hololens 2 seems to have had a bad ending, if layoffs in that department are any indication and yet another executive with bad behavior problems.

Like Humane, Magic Leap had impressive investors attached to it, including AT&T, Google and Alibaba Group, and partnerships with content creators like Disney’s Lucasfilm. Humane having ties to significant partners doesn’t say much because consumer gadgets is a tough sell.

Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno said that while they have so far been secretive about the product they plan to develop, they hope to create an open and collaborative company culture. It sounds like their Apple roots are strong. Wearables startups is a tough business, and they need to power Generative A.I. into their products to embrace the hype so that consumers might actually want to try whatever they are building.